I worked for two years and saved almost nothing. What I got wrong.
I had a salary for two years and almost nothing to show for it. Looking back, it wasn't one decision. It was a handful of habits.
Where it went
- Fever shopping. It blew up my monthly savings.
- The quick night out. Another hit to the monthly savings.
- Eating out. Often when I was stressed or bored.
- Spending to impress. Trying to look a certain way in front of other people.
- Trips. I overspent on them.
Looking at the list, a lot of it was feelings: stress, boredom, wanting to impress. I wasn't buying things so much as buying relief.
The goal I didn't believe
I never had a clear goal. When I did name one, part of me didn't think it would happen. That's a quiet kind of failure, because nothing looks wrong. You just keep choosing the thing in front of you over a goal you've already half given up on.
Three things I'd change
- Pick a goal small enough to believe. Not the impressive one. The one where, if you honestly rate it out of ten, you say seven or eight. Believing it matters more than the size of it.
- Write down why, not just how much. The amount tells you what happened. The reason (stressed, bored, with people, trying to impress) tells you what to do about it.
- Plan the bad day instead of pretending it won't come. On a recent trip I went over budget, and what helped was not feeling guilty about it. I re-planned the days that were left, changed a few things, and enjoyed the rest. Adapting beat punishing myself.
What I did with it
I turned those three things into an app, because the tools I knew treated a bad month as something to display, not something to recover from. It's called Delveni. It's early and still rough in places.
If any of this sounds like you, the full story is here, or you can try it for a month.